Clinical Informatics Fellowship
Clinical informatics is an increasingly critical field that unites patient care expertise with advances in information technology to transform information and communications systems such as electronic health records.
Fellows collaborate with clinicians across multiple disciplines to design, implement, and integrate systems that improve patient care and strengthen the clinician-patient relationship. In 2014, Stanford became the nation's first ACGME-accredited clinical informatics fellowship program.
The two-year Stanford Medicine Clinical Informatics Fellowship is able to accept trainees from a number of primary specialty backgrounds.
Emergency Medicine physicians participate in the Stanford Clinical Informatics Fellowship thanks to a collaborative effort between the Department of Emergency Medicine and the Stanford Clinical Informatics Fellowship programs. Emergency medicine fellows will have the opportunity to work clinically in the ED and on ED-related informatics projects during their fellowship.
Informatics Fellow Dev Dash, MD
“Emergency Medicine stands to benefit the most from having machine intelligence assist patient care because we see patients in a very short sliver of time,” explains Dev Dash, MD, Emergency Medicine Informatics Fellow. “We have access to an overwhelming amount of past data, with very limited time to parse through all of it.”
Dash is leading multiple projects during his two-year fellowship, ranging from artificial intelligence (AI) to digital health quality improvement efforts. Notably, Dash has developed an AI system that can review cardiac echocardiograms to assess the quality of cardiac output and determine if the images are adequate. While cardiology and radiology have similar AI assessment technology, they utilize images secured in a dedicated echocardiogram lab. These algorithms do not always transfer to the types of images acquired in the fast-paced Emergency Department (ED) where images are, “not as pretty” according to Dr. Ian Brown; EM Informatics Fellowship Director. Dash’s focuses on images secured at the patient bedside in the ED is unique.
Dash is also developing dashboards that will enable Emergency Medicine physicians to review practice variation and resource utilization. Feedback on physician performance enables providers to grow and improve but real data is needed. Using informatics, physicians and administrators can spot patterns and discrepancies and also break down actions to examine specific care pathways or disease processes more precisely. “Informatics enables us to determine when doctors provide care that is evidence-based and when we deviate based on specific patient characteristics or even personal biases,” says Brown.
Throughout his fellowship, Dash has worked closely with both clinicians and technical experts often bringing these two enterprises together to impact patient care. “I’m familiar with both clinical and technical worlds and their respective vocabularies so I try to bridge that gap,” Dash says. As part of the fellowship, Dash is also interning for a startup and mentoring medical students, residents, computer science graduate students, and other trainees.